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Telemedicine In Ukraine
Telemedicine In Ukraine
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Thank you, I promise no more jokes, so I'm Jerome Lee again, and I am the co-founder of Health Tech Without Borders that I'm going to talk a little bit about that for the next few minutes, and unrelated, I was a consultant for Butterfly Network back in the day. So you know, our why is pretty clear. As you guys know, disasters are increasing in frequency, unfortunately it's also more expensive to respond to these and fix them. One of the most expensive ones over the last two years was actually Hurricane Ian that went around Florida and hit the west coast of Florida, which was unprepared. And the cost of that continues, right, it takes years to recover. What's interesting is those numbers out of USAID and multiple other governmental agencies do not include conflict-related environments and man-made disasters. So the numbers are probably much higher. This is a picture from one of our mental health specialists that we work with within Ukraine from her apartment complex, just right across outside her window. And what's intriguing to me and kind of crazy is this picture. So this is her working in an environment where there was no power, right? And so she was using candlelight to sort of light her apartment while she continued seeing patients, however, she had power to her laptop because it was pre-charged, and she continued to see patients, right? Which is incredible in a world where we now have technology that we can continue doing things that we wouldn't think about, especially in healthcare, that makes the impossible really possible these days. And so at HealthTech Without Borders, you know, we're really here to connect people in crises, but we define it more broadly, right? It's not only conflict-affected, it's also climate-affected, refugees access to care and sort of the whole continuum of it. But it's really also not the tech itself, a lot of it is really to connect two people or multiple folks to sort of work through the issues and what they need to do. We're in nine countries currently, and we've mobilized over 800 volunteers, 200,000 consults, and over 100 hours, I mean, 1,000 hours of mental health support sort of delivered so far. I want to do a little deeper dive into our efforts in Ukraine. And so with the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a few of us got together and thought, maybe we can support Ukraine with telemedicine, especially after sort of seeing Netsen and all these other telemedicine efforts during COVID. It all worked better than we expected in so many ways. And so we put out a call to action to the world for tech companies and volunteers to see who would step up to help. And it was incredible what we got. We had 40 tech companies, 800 volunteers, not all clinicians, mostly clinicians, who all volunteered, all pro bono to support, right? And putting that all together, we ended up going live with four of the companies and multiple volunteers and were able to deliver over about 62,000 consults to Ukrainians within Ukraine by September to November-ish. We did publish our timeline and sort of our process just for future and other folks, other NGOs that might want to do this in the New England Journal-Catalyst. So if you guys get bored, you can read through it. And a big part of our success was we did go live with four tech companies. However, we ended up sunsetting three of them. And the one that we worked most with was a locally-based startup in Kiev, Ukrainian-built, and of course was there pre-war, went pro bono with us with the war. And most of the consults were there because there was already a lot of trust in the system, right? The other three tech companies, interestingly, were probably better tech than the one that was a startup in Ukraine, but it was almost barely used. And we're going to talk a little bit about that later. The other big part was Rada, which is the first thing on top on the left, is the parliament of Ukraine put out a message to their citizens to say, you should use our platform too. So that was very helpful to get the volume. So what do we see, right? So it was all primary care. And these are self-selected folks who have access to technology and who are able to access our tech, right, and our doctors and our clinicians. If you think about it, it's really the folks who are, and a lot of this was like the two-year-old with a fever, and they needed to have a warm touch with a healthcare provider to figure out if they wanted to take that risk to get to the hospital or otherwise. But it's really all primary care-related, general medical care that we provided, not the crazy trauma care and everything else that you think about in the hospitals there. Oh, sorry, I can't go back, right? The other interesting part is the second table on the left is that most of our consults were actually text-based, right? The platform itself, and all three, all four of them, can do video sync, audio sync, and text async. And it was almost all text-based, 99% were text-based. Most folks were talking about how they would lose connectivity, but it would still be stored. These consults lasted much longer, as you can imagine, versus the synced ones can finish in about 20 minutes. The async ones took about two hours, but most of them were async. The other thing we wanted to focus on was mental health. And we realized that there was probably a need for mental health support, but not in a different way. Like COVID showed us all that clinicians, ourselves, ICU docs, we all need some type of support, right? And so instead of doing direct-to-patient care for a lot of reasons, which was also on the other platform, we decided to start supporting the mental health specialists and folks we knew within Ukraine so they can continue seeing their patients. They all started seeing things that they just never saw before, especially children and all these other things that they typically did not see pre-war, right? And so we set up this program called Helping Healers Heal, where we had Health Tech Without Borders trained specialists that would essentially coach or work with about 40 different local mental health specialists in-country so that they can continue seeing their patients. All of them have told us that they probably would have quit or reduced their volume without our support. And, of course, it was an educational component, too, where we can sort of bring in pediatric specialists and other things as they needed them with what they were seeing. The other interesting part of all this was as we sort of worked through this, we were asked to see if we can support virtual care for nursing students and medical schools in rural areas that are a little bit more mobile. So we worked with our operational partners in the area and dropped a container classroom that was fully set up that could plug into the power grid, has solar panels, heating, AC, everything that you need, as well as all the laptops to continue education for these guys. And that's one of the teams. And so, you know, I just want to conclude and say, you know, tech is here. It's ready. If we had, you know, the right resources, the right folks involved, the right expertise, it's fully scalable in the right way, right? It's not the best tech. It only has to be tech that can connect folks to come together. And so I do believe that as we think about all this, we can definitely scale it rapidly over the next few years if we can build it appropriately. This is the whole team that we have, all volunteers. A lot of them are in leadership positions, country directors across our enterprise, all amazing people. I just want to sort of show you guys who they were since we couldn't do any of this without them. Thank you.
Video Summary
Jerome Lee, co-founder of Health Tech Without Borders, discussed their mission of leveraging technology to provide healthcare in crisis situations, including conflicts and climate disasters. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they mobilized 800 volunteers and four tech companies, delivering 62,000 telemedicine consults. Emphasizing primary care and mental health support, they collaborated with local specialists to provide ongoing care. Most consultations were text-based due to connectivity issues. Additionally, they supported virtual education for medical students by setting up mobile classrooms, highlighting the scalability and potential of tech-driven healthcare solutions in crisis settings.
Asset Caption
One-Hour Concurrent Session | Optimus Curae Ubique: How Technology Can Enable Critical Care From Anywhere to Anywhere
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Year
2024
Keywords
telemedicine
crisis healthcare
virtual education
mental health
technology
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